On December 23, 1947, three scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey, named John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, demonstrated a strange little gadget to their bosses. It was barely the size of a fingernail, made of a sliver of germanium with two gold wires poked into it, all glued onto a triangle of plastic. When they ran electricity through it, the device amplified a tiny signal into a loud one. They called it the transistor, and it would soon change everything.
Before the transistor, computers and radios needed glass vacuum tubes about the size of a lightbulb to control electric signals. The tubes got blazing hot, burned out constantly, and a single computer needed thousands of them. The first computer, ENIAC, used 17,468 vacuum tubes and filled an entire room. Transistors did the same job but were thousands of times smaller, used barely any power, and almost never wore out. The three Bell Labs scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the invention.
Engineers quickly figured out how to pack transistors closer and closer together on tiny chips of silicon. A chip the size of a fingernail today contains more than 50 billion transistors - yes, billion with a B. Without them, there would be no smartphones, no video games, no Netflix, no internet, no electric cars, no Mars rovers. Every text message you ever send rides on the shoulders of a 1947 invention. The biggest revolution of the modern world came from a tiny plastic triangle on a Bell Labs workbench.
